| Steve and I flew to Denver, Colorado on May 17, rented a car, and drove about 2,000 miles around the Southwest. Our route took us through Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
  |
||
| We
had great luck with the weather all throughout our trip. The rain held
off while we were at the park, which gave us time to see some great scenery.
(I love that picture of Steve as photographer.)
The park didn't open the road that crosses the Continental Divide until Memorial Day (we were there on the 18th), but we did see a few spring skiers. |
||||
| We spent the second day driving from Denver to Flagstaff, by way of Santa Fe and Albequerque, New Mexico. |
Albequerque - drive up liquor! Yee ha!
|
Luckily, this was the only stormy day of our trip and as we had to spend it all in the car, it might as well have been raining. I found that storms in the Southwest are just as beautiful as other scenery, especially when the big rigs kick the water up off the road and into patches of sun. Steve got a great photo of that phenomenon. |
||
| Many Native American trinket stands later, we arrived in Flagstaff at the tail end of sunset. I wish I had a picture because the sky was incredibly purple. I had never seen a sunset with such pure and exclusively purple shading before and probably never will until I return to Arizona. | |||
 |
 |
 |
||
| We
spent the whole of the third day at the Grand Canyon. We arrived around
10 o'clock, which was good planning on our part as the big crowd hadn't
arrived yet and we were able to find parking easily. Just driving into
the parking lot took my breath away.
I can still smell the baked earth; it smelled like the inside of a kiln or clay slip, for those of you who know things about pottery. Words of advice: you need at least three times as much water when you walk around out West than you do out East. Steve and I were keeping a relatively lesiurely pace, but got dehydrated quite quickly. On our way back to the hotel that night, exhausted and sore, I rested my head on the car window and realized that the sky was absolutely full of stars. I told Steve to stop the car and we got out to marvel at the sky. Every late spring star seemed visible, from horizon to horizon, and they lit the nighttime landscape. I felt comforted somehow, as if the blanket of stars kept me grounded to the earth. The night sky over New Jersey, in comparison, is much more empty and stark and far less comforting, even in the middle of the Pine Barrens. |
||||
 |
 |
|
| We weren't planning on going through Utah, but we decided to drive through Monument Valley as we were driving up to Durango, Colorado. We saw a sign on the highway and we decided to make the turn. I'm glad we did; it added to my overall feeling of being underwater the area was giving me. | ||
  |
| For most of the trip, we played it by ear and didn't have strict plans on how to spend our time. One of the exceptions was that Steve insisted on going to Four Corners since it's the ultimate tourist trap. The only attraction is a plaque on the point where New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado meet. It's also in the Navajo nation, which means that, technically speaking, those four states don't meet in the neat and tidy right angles we'd like to think they do. The attraction is based on false pretenses; therefore, it's a trap! (Boy, I really sapped the fun out of that, huh?) |
| Go anyway, because I still really enjoyed being there and they have two lines of food and trinket stands. A couple of them serve great Fry Bread (flat, fried dough). Besides, how could I have missed this great photo op! |
